Ostrowski's Outlook XI
Fall 2001
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Henry Kaiser showed up in Vancouver Washington. He looked at a piece of land along the Columbia River and decided that it would be a good place to build ships. Six months later the first ship was launched.
We uncovered this little story when we were working on a Local Improvement District for the shipyard in the early 80's. Dennis Ross, who's now the Professional Development Director for APWA, was working for us in Vancouver and had put together a very complicated schedule to help us get the LID improvements built on time. We had the LID process and a shoreline permit to get and an environmental review to do and a bunch of other things I can't remember. We were really proud that we finished on time and had a package ready to call for bids in six months.
That was when we discovered that Kaiser had built infrastructure and turned out a product in six months and we had essentially turned out paper in six months. I remembered that story a few years ago when I sat at a City Engineers meeting during the joint Oregon/Washington APWA conference. We were all complaining about how hard it was to get anything done and my mind wandered as I looked across the river to the shipyard where Kaiser went from idea to product in six months. It occurred to me then that even what we had done in six months in the early 80's probably couldn't be done in the late 90's.
I remembered this story now because we're at war again. I know why things moved so swiftly during the Second World War. It was because everyone knew that the most important thing going on was the war and that the most important thing happening in Vancouver was the building of ships. That sense of common purpose and focus has been missing for a long time. It's kept us from solving our transportation problems and almost every other kind of problem faced by public works officials.
We may now have a common purpose and a common focus. None of us would have asked for a war to re-teach what we should know already, but maybe we're being given an opportunity to learn again how powerful common purpose can be and how we can use it to solve our everyday problems that seem so small right now.